Python Reddit API Client — No API Key Required

Access Reddit data without OAuth, API keys, or registration. Get posts, comments, subreddit stats, and search results using Reddit's public JSON endpoints.

The Problem

Reddit's official API requires:

1. Create a Reddit app
2. Get OAuth credentials
3. Handle token refresh
4. Deal with rate limits

This client skips all of that. It uses Reddit's public .json endpoints — the same ones that power old.reddit.com.

Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/spinov001-art/python-reddit-api.git
cd python-reddit-api
python reddit_api.py

No dependencies. No API key. Just Python 3.6+.

What You Can Do

Get Subreddit Posts

from reddit_api import RedditClient

client = RedditClient()
posts = client.get_subreddit_posts("python", sort="top", limit=10, time_filter="week")

for post in posts:
    print(f"[{post['score']}] {post['title']}")

Search Reddit

results = client.search("web scraping python", sort="relevance", limit=20)
for r in results:
    print(f"r/{r['subreddit']}: {r['title']} ({r['score']} pts)")

Get Comments

comments = client.get_comments("python", "abc123", limit=50)
for c in comments:
    print(f"u/{c['author']} ({c['score']} pts): {c['body'][:100]}")

Get Subreddit Info

info = client.get_subreddit_info("datascience")
print(f"Subscribers: {info['subscribers']:,}")
print(f"Active now: {info['active_users']:,}")

Data Fields

Posts

Field	Type	Description
id	str	Post ID
title	str	Post title
author	str	Username
score	int	Net upvotes
upvote_ratio	float	% upvoted
num_comments	int	Comment count
url	str	Link URL
selftext	str	Post body (text posts)
subreddit	str	Subreddit name
permalink	str	Full Reddit URL
flair	str	Post flair

Use Cases

• Market research: What do people say about your product?
• Content ideas: What questions get the most upvotes?
• Sentiment analysis: Track brand mentions across subreddits
• Trend detection: Monitor emerging topics in any niche
• Dataset building: Collect training data for NLP models

Limitations

• Public endpoints only (no private subreddits)
• ~60 requests/minute rate limit
• Max 100 posts per request (use pagination for more)
• Some subreddits may block non-authenticated requests

Related Projects

• awesome-no-auth-apis — 50+ APIs that work without keys
• awesome-python-api-clients — Python wrappers for free APIs
• Reddit Scraper Pro — Production-grade Reddit scraper on Apify

License

MIT